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No, your quote says that the parents didn't know that they existed and that's why they didn't use them. And this matches my experience after reading through hundreds if not thousands of publicly available cases of minors being groomed on Discord. The majority of minors don't have parental controls enabled. I don't have any hard figures but my gut feeling is that roughly 0.01% of minors on Discord have an account that is actually under parental controls, if at all.
I think the main problem with them is that it's a completely opt-in system and the minor has to intentionally share a QR code with the parent in order to be connected. So even if we assume they voluntarily link the accounts or are forced by their parents to do it, at any time they can just create another account that is outside the purview of the parents, and they would be none the wiser.
Discord parental controls look to me to be something that Discord can point to and say "hey, we're safe for children!" rather than actually being safe for children.
Bro come on. At some point a parent has to take responsibility here. Why would anyone let their kids just hop onto these websites without doing basic due diligence or educating them on the reality of predators?
If a platform provides robust parental controls then they've done enough, full stop. The baton of responsibility is passed.
See downthread. There is a pervasive culture of letting your kids have unrestricted Internet access, it's hard to change, and anybody going against it will be seen as overly paranoid.
They should also ban pedophiles when they are reported and proactively look for them too.
I understand there's a culture of letting your kids do whatever they want. I see it every day. It doesn't make it right and more importantly doesn't transfer responsibility to someone else.
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My parents (admittedly over 60 now) can't reliably open a browser on a laptop. They certainly have no idea what a QR code is. The idea that parents will be able to find the parental controls, understand what they're doing, and set them independently is unlikely in many cases, so they have to trust their children. In ten years it may be quite different but right now I think that's still the reality and realistically Discord has to bear that in mind.
I don't find this convincing at all. The parents failing here are elder millennials with a smattering of young gen Xers: digital natives. They're being lazy and stupid, and they should know better after being on the Internet at similar ages as their kids.
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If your parents are over 60, they are presumably no longer expected to be taking a hand in managing your online activities? (if not, better not tell them about The Motte!)
I'd think that this level of technical incompetence would be a pretty big outlier for anyone much younger than that (ie. current parents of young children) -- anyone I know born after 1970ish can certainly find and navigate parental controls if they have to.
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What is the alternative to an opt in system? In this specific case we're taking about the ability to add friends. Is no one allowed to add friends on discord until they prove they are a legal adult? Is that accomplished by setting a drop down box in their profile or must they upload a government issued ID?
How about parents take responsibility for their kids instead of imposing restrictions on all the rest of us because of their laziness.
Banning pedophiles from the platform as soon as they are reported, and proactively looking for them too.
Easier said than done. There is a pervasive culture of letting your kids have unrestricted Internet access, and I have a feeling that any parent who goes against this norm and, for example, stringently monitors their access or even prohibits them from using the Internet entirely (because arguably, kids shouldn't even be on the Internet at all) is going to get looks from other people, or at least their kid will say "Billy gets to use the Internet, why can't I?" Unless everybody in a community agrees that the Internet is too dangerous for kids to be used unsupervised, reasons like "but predators are online" sound a lot like "I don't let my kid outside after 3 o'clock because a stranger might come and snatch her."
You misunderstand: that norm is enforced merely by intentionally refusing to prioritize your version of safety.
Yes, which is why they're both treated as absurd by psychologically-healthy individuals. Interestingly, the latter is espoused by more parents than it would naturally be since the stranger is far more likely to be the State, which is far more dangerous.
It is interesting to see the parallels between how the paranoid in our culture seeks to treat children and how fundamentalist Islamic cultures seeks to treat women. I'm not convinced it's good for their personal development, but personal development is not a terminal value in these cultures (Islam worships Allah, westerners worship Safety) and "but muh risk of predation" is merely a fig leaf over that.
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